Weaning Page

Weaning

The first step when using the new weaning page is to Add
Cages. You can add cages in several ways:

1. By scanning the cage

2. By visiting the view cage page

3. By selecting cages in the search
results

4. By holding the cages

These cages are the breeding (or pregnancy, or ET...) cages
which you'll be weaning from. If you want to pool into an existing
cage, that'll come at the next step.

Step 1: Select Litters

Select litters

Once you have your cages displayed, you're ready to Select
Litters. When you get to this step, you might notice that the
litters are already selected for you. In fact, that will almost
always be the case, because most of the time, you'll be trying to
wean a litter which has reached its weaning date. Once all of
the litters that you'd like to wean are selected, you'll need to
enter a very small bit of information: just the number of male and
female mice born for each litter. This should include any mice
that are going to be culled and any mice that aren't yet ready to
be weaned; that is, all the mice that were born, no matter what is
happening with them. You'll see why in a second.

Step 2: Assign Mice to Cages

Now that we have the basic litter information all filled
out, we're ready to move on to the workhorse of the new weaning
page: the 'Assign Mice to Cages' step. This is where the magic happens.
This awesome new page allows you complete control over exactly
where your animals end up, how they're named, and their genotyping
information. To see a simple example of weaning, simply click the
Number Mice button, and then the 'Assign Mice to Cages' button. This will
do a basic numbering of the pups and then distribute them evenly
amongst some new cages. In a lot of cases, that might be all you
wanted to do, in which case you could now move on to the next
step. But what if you wanted more control? The weaning page is
strong, and yet supple: you can easily perform a straight-forward
weaning, but you can also easily adjust the results to your
liking.

Number and Assign Mice to Cages

Move mouse location

If a mouse isn't in the cage you'd prefer, move him! Simply
drag the mouse out of the cage and into a different cage, or into
the “new cage” area at the bottom of the screen. You can also drag
the “tag” representing a pup out of the litter, either before or
after assigning that mouse to a cage. Or, if you'd like to remove
him from the cage entirely, just click on the little “x” that
appears when you hover over the mouse in its current destination
cage. That will put him back in the litter, which will then be
marked as “Partially Weaned”, automagically.

Terminate mice in existing cage

If you are moving mice to an existing cage, there is an option
to terminate mice in the cage to make room for the new mice.

What if, say, you have genotyping results which indicate
only some of your mice should be kept? You can mark some of the
mice as “culled” by clicking on the “x” to the far left of the pup
line. That pup will now not be assigned to a destination cage.
Note that you can do your numbering first, before culling, so that
your sequential values are still all used up: that way, numbering
can still happen automatically, without having to type in the
individual numbers for mice that you're keeping. Nice!

Genotyping and culling

You may have noticed already that there are several options
in the numbering and assigning sections. These options allow you
additional control over those automatic processes, so that you can
fine-tune to whatever scheme you use. You can number your male and
female animals starting at different values, and with different
intervals, giving you a wealth of options. You can also control
whether or not animals are pooled together from separate litters,
for males as well as females. You can change the number of animals
housed in a cage, from one to five, and you can choose whether you
want them distributed evenly, or not. In either case, the system
will create as few cages as possible, whilst respecting the
regulations on what can go together in a cage.

Numbering and assigning options

Step 3: Preview

Preview

Once you have the cages all set up to your liking, you're
ready to move on to the next step: Previewing Cages. This is your
chance to make sure you've got everything correct before actually
saving the new cages. This page also allows you to edit some of
the information on those cages, including the comments. By
default, it'll include a short comment stating where the mice came
from, but you can change that however you'd like before saving and
printing. If you want to change anything about the cage other than
the comments, you can press the “Edit” button at the top of that
cage.

Step 4: Cage Results

Cage results

Finally, once you press the “Save” button, you'll be
presented with the improved cage results page. From here, you can
obviously print all of your new cages, just like you've always
been able to do. You can also select a subset of cages to print,
or to hold, or go to view individual cages if you'd like. Just
make sure that you do, at some point, print out all the cards for
those new cages!

Advanced Features

Quick Wean

Now, there are a few advanced, but extremely useful,
features that I've skipped over. I'll cover those now. First of
all, there's the Quick Wean feature. This allows you to skip the
Assign Mice to Cages step entirely, going right to the Preview step by
automatically numbering and then assigning your mice. This would
be kind of useful for very basic weanings, but what it makes it
really exciting is the addition of Preferences. By setting up your
preferences in advance (they're saved for your account once you
have them set), you can customize exactly what the default
numbering and assigning options are. If you always want to have odd males
and even females, you can do that. If you always want to pool
females but not males, you can do that. Depending on your
workflow, you might not always be able to Quick Wean, but with
well-set preferences, it might be pretty often. And even if you
can't quick wean because you need some fine-tuning, your
Preferences will still be set as the defaults when you get to the
Assign Mice to Cages step. That way, you're already most of the way there.